


say the word

by singsongsung



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-30
Updated: 2014-08-30
Packaged: 2018-02-15 08:25:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2222265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Want to get out of here?” she asks. </p>
<p>He grins lazily. “You should know the answer to that one, beautiful.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	say the word

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstaudrina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/gifts).



> Post-5x16. I wasn't watching GG at this point so forgive me if the timeline is a little loopy in the beginning.

_stop the world  
_ _’cause I wanna_  
get off   
with you.

 

 

The hospital hallway vacillates between eerie quiet and bursts of noise. Moments of silence are followed by the piercing ring of a phone, the sound of an urgent page over intercom, the rattle of a cart of cleaning supplies, the sound of the wheels of a stretcher rolling over the floor.

She sits in a stiff, green plastic chair, knees pulled up to her chest. All she can think is that she doesn’t know what to think – her mind feels distinctly empty, much like this hallway. She doesn’t know if she feels at a loss or if she just feels _lost_.

“Serena?”

She opens her eyes, glancing up. Rufus is standing about a foot away, hovering, looking at her uncertainly.

“You alright?” he asks quietly.

Dropping her legs down onto the floor, she asks, “Are we leaving?”

He nods. “Your mother’s ready.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t ask where Blair disappeared to, doesn’t ask if anyone called Eric. It occurs to her that she doesn’t really care.

 

 

 

Lily’s default mode is micromanaging. Serena says _yes_ and _no_ and _whatever_ to her mother’s questions about funeral arrangements. Rufus hovers around them, making chilli and tea.

Her voicemail starts to fill up – Eric’s quiet, earnest voice saying that he _can’t_ get out of this prior commitment, that he misses her, that he’s so sorry, that he sends her his love; one message from Blair asking how she is; one message from Chuck asking if it’s safe to come by or if Lily will try to get his measurements for a new suit for the funeral. There is radio silence from Dan.

Serena throws her phone away.

 

 

 

It’s cloudy on the day of the funeral. Serena drags herself out of bed and to the shower, ties her hair up in a bun and puts on the black dress her mother had chosen for her.

Her father’s waiting when she comes downstairs, a large pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head. He sets his newspaper down and stands up.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he says, looking as though he wants to hug her.

The four-year-old part of her wants to say _hi, Daddy_ and dive into his arms. She can still remember the way he used to lift her up over his head, the way it felt like flying when she stretched her arms out. Serena can remember all kinds of things, but lately she finds she’d rather forget.

She says, “Hi,” and steals his newspaper, sitting down and staring resolutely at one of the pages, not reading a single word, until her mother is finally ready to go.

 

 

 

The funeral draws a large crowd. Serena’s hand is shaken again and again. People tell her, _I’m so sorry_. The give her hugs. _I’m so sorry_ , as if they’d had something to do with it.

There’s a heaviness in her chest that she can’t seem to shake. She starts when Nate touches her arm, looking over at him and then at Lola, who’s standing just over his shoulder.

“You okay?” he asks her softly, seriously.

Serena’s smile feels the way her mother’s smile looks – lips pressed tight together, lifted very slightly at the corners. She’s glad her eyes are hidden by her sunglasses. “Yeah,” she says. Nate believes her, and why shouldn’t he? He’s not here for her; he’s here for his girlfriend.

When the coffin is lowered, she watches Rufus take her mother’s hand, their fingers interlocking, and she feels very alone.

 

 

 

The wake is the same story as the funeral, hugs and handshakes and condolences from people she doesn’t really know. She drinks five glasses of wine before she decides she’s had enough of this whole day and slips away upstairs.

She tugs the bobby pins and elastics out of her hair on the way down the hallway, letting it fall out of the messy bun she’s had it in all day and down around her shoulders. She steps out of her heels, picking them up with two hooked fingers and walking down the rest of the hall in her bare feet.

She nudges her bedroom door open with an elbow, completely prepared to burrow under her blankets and pretend the past hour, day, month, year hasn’t existed at all –

“Hey, beautiful.”

Her head snaps up, hair falling into her face, and her shoes drop down to the floor. She can only stare for a moment at the black slacks, the grey shirt, the easy half-smirk, the way he’s just sitting on her bed like this is completely _ordinary_.

“What are you – ”

He shrugs, leaning forward, elbows against his knees briefly. “I heard.”

“You heard,” she repeats, not moving.

“About Cece.”

“You heard,” she murmurs again. “And then…you came here.”

“Had to pay my respects,” he says with another shrug. He pushes to his feet, eyes on her face. “And check in with you.”

She thinks of how she’d kicked him out of the car, hadn’t heard a single word from him since then. “Check in with me,” she repeats. She sounds like a parrot.

“Yeah. You know, see if whatever your idiot you’re dating right now is taking care of you.” He’s just standing there in front of her, the first button of his shirt undone, shoes discarded by the foot of her bed, sock feet on her floor. “Is it still Archibald?”

“No.” She shakes her head a little. “Nate and I broke up – ” And it’s funny, how this is true, “Years ago.”

“That kid from Brooklyn, then?”

She drops her gaze from his face to the floor, shaking her head again. He’s quiet, just waiting for her, so she takes a deep breath, asks softly, “And what is the idiot I’m dating supposed to be doing right now?”

Hands in his pockets, he tilts his head as if he’s deep in thought. “The first step would be to ask if you’re okay.”

Serena nods a little, eyes flicking back up to his face.

“And then you might need a hug,” he continues. “And you might need to know that your grandmother loved you more than she loved anything or anyone.” He takes a couple steps closer. “And maybe some good sympathy sex.”

She rolls her eyes half-heartedly, looking away from him again.

Carter touches her arm, the lightest brush of fingertips. “Are you okay?” he wonders.

She looks back at him, eyes roaming over his face for a moment. He looks the same, yet a little different. In the end, she just shrugs.

He nods, hand skimming down her arm until his fingers can curl around hers. He pulls her closer, slips his other arm around her waist in a hug. “I’m sorry,” he says, by her ear. “She loved you so much, you know that.”

Serena gives into the hug after a beat, one of her arms wrapping around him, fingers fisting around a handful of his shirt at his back. She drops her forehead to his shoulder, nodding a little.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and it means something, coming from him. She doesn’t protest when his hug loosens for a moment as he reaches behind her to push the door of the room closed.

 

 

 

Serena wakes up late in the evening, disoriented. Carter is asleep on the other side of her bed, his head resting on her favourite pillow. She can’t remember how they fell asleep – one moment they were talking, his fingers toying with the clasp of her bra, and now they’re here.

She brushes her fingers through her hair and then pushes the blankets aside, getting to her feet. Her dress is wrinkly, tangled around her legs, pushed off one of her shoulders, so she just slips out of it, tugging on a pair of pyjama pants and a sweater instead before she heads downstairs for a glass of water.

It’s very quiet – she’s not sure where her mother or her father or Rufus or Aunt Carol are. There are remnants of the food served at the wake sitting on the kitchen counter and she pauses to snack for a moment before she gets a glass out of one of the cupboards.

The sound of a voice, hushed but enraged, make her freeze, glass in one hand. It’s her father’s voice, low and serious, saying, “She is my _daughter_.”

“William, let’s not do this now,” the other side of the argument responds, quiet but firm – it’s Aunt Carol.

“You kept me from her for her entire life,” he says, and Serena’s hold on her glass tightens; she doesn’t understand.

“Your track record with your other children suggests that you certainly could have done that on your own,” Carol snaps back. “Not to mention what Lily would say about – ”

“She’s my _daughter_ ,” William says again, like it _means_ something, and it hits Serena like a physical blow that he’s not talking about her – he’s never talked about her like that.

 

 

 

Carter’s bleary-eyed when she shakes him awake; it’s almost cute, the way he squints at her, murmurs, “Hey…”

“Hey,” she echoes, buzzing with energy, perched on the bed next to him. He reaches for her automatically, an arm slipping around her waist, his hand slipping under the hem of her sweater to touch her skin. “Want to get out of here?” she asks.

He grins lazily. “You should know the answer to that one, beautiful.”

She sets a bag on her bed next to him and starts throwing things in, dresses and jeans and sweaters and shoes. Carter yawns and sits up in her bed, opening her laptop and browsing through ticket sales.

“What do you say to leaving for Munich in three hours?” he asks lazily, already typing his credit card number in.

Serena’s hands hover around the pictures on her dresser, the one with Blair on their first day at Constance, the one with Dan at cotillion. She drops her hands, turning to look at Carter. “I say yes.”

 

 

 

She buys a new phone at their stopover in London. She doesn’t add any names to the contact list.

On the flight to Munich she tilts her head against Carter’s shoulder. His hand slips into her hair, winding it around his fingers. He doesn’t ask if she’s okay, and she’s happy with that.

 

 

 

She doesn’t want to sleep. She drags Carter to a famous park, to local bars, to the shopping district. He follows her around wearing a half-smirk; he buys her drinks, he carries her bags, he reaches for her hand when they dart across the street amidst traffic.

It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning and they’re sitting in silence on a bench, Serena’s impulse purchases scattered around them, when he says, “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

She presses her lips together. “And what?”

“And…whatever you want,” he shrugs, studying her face. “Sleep.”

“Where’ve you been?” she asks abruptly. “Since…”

“Around,” he says. “I’ve been around.”

“I don’t know where _around_ is,” she says, abruptly frustrated.

Carter waves his arms around, gesturing to their surroundings. “Looks something like this, beautiful.”

 

 

 

Serena stubbornly doesn’t let him fuck her for three weeks. She lets him kiss her neck in elevators and wrap his arm around her waist in public and at night, in bed, she straddles his lap and kisses him hard but when his hands slip under her clothes she pushes them away. She often goes to sleep first and she knows she must be leaving him frustrated, but there’s something inside of her that just isn’t ready yet.

It finally happens in Belgium, after they’ve eaten an entire box of chocolate together. Carter’s hands snake under her shirt and move to cup her breasts and he seems vaguely surprised that she allows it. “You’re a mystery,” he tells her fondly, fingers pinching her nipples, mouth skimming greedily over her collarbone.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, and she can’t help but smile, letting him press her body into the hotel bed’s mattress.

Carter’s teeth graze her skin and his fingers press tightly against her hips; he’s going to leave marks all over his body, like he always does.

 

 

 

They rent a bright blue convertible and Carter smoothly drives on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, taking them from country to country, city to city, Serena’s feet propped on the dashboard and her hair whipping around in the wind. She does not tell him about her father. She does not talk about Dan. She hardly ever uses her phone.

Instead, they talk nonsense, making plans that will never come true. Serena says they’ll buy a Scottish castle and fake their way into aristocratic circles. Carter says they’ll open a nightclub in Istanbul and Serena’ll learn to DJ. Together, they construct an elaborate scenario in which they both marry royalty and secretly carry on an affair with each other.

Sometimes they sleep in the back of that car, in a field or pulled over on a gravelly side road. Serena likes using Carter’s chest as a pillow and catching sight of the stars as she slowly falls asleep. It only rains on them once.

 

 

 

In Greece, they drink plenty of ouzo and have sex in public places. Serena wears low-cut shirts and gets all her drinks for free, even with bruises from Carter’s teeth all over her breasts.

She turns a year older in Santorini, wearing cut-off jeans and a neon pink bra, water lapping over her toes. It is the strangest birthday. She wonders if either of her parents are even aware of the day.

“You look morose, honey,” Carter says, fingers combing through her tangled hair.

“Don’t call me honey,” Serena says. “I’m not morose.”

“You love when I call you honey,” he says. “Gets you all weak in the knees.”

He presses kisses to her neck, his mouth warm against her skin. “What is it, you miss Blair?”

“I don’t miss anything,” she says softly, her hands curling around his arms.

“Liar, liar,” Carter tsks, slipping one of his legs between both of hers.

Her grip tightens on his arms. “I need to get out of here.”

“Back to the hotel?” he guesses.

“No, this – place. This country. I need to get out of here.” There’s a strange feeling in Serena’s chest, in her throat, like her body can’t quite remember how to breathe. She pushes away from Carter and runs for the water, plunges in and relishes the cool, sharp air entering her lungs when she finally resurfaces.

 

 

 

In Nairobi, the sky is pink at night. Serena plays games with Carter, pretends not to know him when he sidles up to her at the bar, makes him work for her, makes him seduce her, makes him take off his own clothes first once he’s taken her back to their shared hotel room. She’s never quite sure what she’s looking for.

They ride elephants and sleep in a hotel built into the trees. She cuts her hair very, very short, just below her ears, buys and wears large earrings. She gets her bellybutton pierced. She wonders, vaguely, in the midst of alcohol and whatever Carter pulls out of his pocket on any given night, what it would take for her to no longer look like herself.

 

 

 

There are very many ways in which Serena is happy. She likes her freedom, the new weightlessness of her haircut. She likes sinking into her first-class pod on an airplane, knowing that she won’t have to worry about where she is for several hours.

And there are parts of her that are madly, deeply in love with Carter, so immersed in this nomadic life they’ve found themselves tangled in. She loves his mouth on her earlobes and his head between her legs. She loves his hands dragging along her skin, loves the taste of him, loves the bedhead he has each and every morning. She loves when he kisses her shoulder.

She is happy in so many ways and, though she’d never say it, would never even admit it to herself, pretty much in love – but there’s still something hollow in the space just beneath her heart, the indent under her ribcage, the bottom of her lungs.

 

 

 

For months they live in a flat in Chile, hanging their laundry to dry on the line that runs out of the window. The blue paint on the walls is flaking away, revealing whiteness underneath.

Carter makes friends with a bunch of men who wear crisp business suits with pockets full of little bags. Serena makes friends with men who wear crisp business suits with pockets full of money. She flirts with them, lets them buy her drinks and beautiful dresses, sometimes kisses them in Carter’s line of sight just to feel the burst of jealousy in his hot breath against her skin later that night. It is an unconventional life but it’s a life she becomes accustomed to.

Her body forgets how to fall asleep without Carter in the bed. If he’s out late she stays awake, reading trashy romance novels. When he gets home he says, “Didn’t have to wait up, beautiful,” and crawls into bed next to her, smelling like smoke. “Tell me what’s happening in your dirty book,” he teases and she tells him, voice all breathy and broken as he gets her off.

 

 

 

Serena is twenty-three when Carter’s parents die. They find out two weeks after the fact, when an investigator finally tracks Carter’s number down. They are in Morocco at the time. Carter never liked his parents much, not since Serena first met him when she was around eight years old, but lawyers demand his presence and Serena sits on the unmade bed and watches his face harden by degrees.

“Roger and Suzanne are dead,” he tells her when the phone call is finally over. “Helicopter down,” he adds, his hand arching through the air, moving downward, and then he won’t let her touch him.

“It’s not fucking like Cece, Serena,” he says, packing his bag. “I’m fine. They were assholes.”

“Carter,” she says softly, frowning, her whole body buzzing with a helpless sort of energy.

“I have to go,” he says. For what, he does not clarify. For his sister, for his inheritance, for nit-picky legalities.

“I’ll come with you,” she says.

Carter kisses her then, so firmly that it leaves her breathless. “Fuck off,” he says. “I’ll be back in a week.”

 

 

 

He is not back in a week. Serena holds her phone close to her ear and listens to the line crackle as he tells her, bitterly, that he’s been left the family company and he has to fucking do something with it. He sounds exhausted and it makes her heart ache. She hums his name softly into the phone and doesn’t comment when his voice sounds like it breaks. She whispers to him in her softest, sultriest voice, just what she’d do to him if she was there, and after he comes she just listens to him breathe.

She does not offer, that night, to fly back to the States, but two weeks later she packs her bags and gets on a plane.

 

 

 

In Manhattan she learns that life has gone on without her. Her brother is going to be a lawyer. Her mother and Rufus have divorced. Dan has written a book.

Things have changed, but she’s still Serena and Carter’s still Carter and in his rented suite they fuck before they talk. Naked in bed drinking scotch on the rocks he tells her, voice raspy with irritation, about all the shit he has to do before he can sell the company and all the guilt-tripping his sister is doing and how painfully annoying it’s all been to him. Serena traces her fingers over his body and she asks him, “Do you miss them? At all?”

He finishes his drink in a single gulp. “No. Does that make me a sociopath?”

Serena thinks of her father, who might be somewhere in this city, who might be anywhere in the world loving a daughter who is not her. For once in her life, she has no desire to know his whereabouts.

“No,” she tells Carter, fingertips on his jaw. “It makes you _my_ sociopath.”

 

 

 

Blair is going to marry Dan. She has proof of this fact on the ring finger of her left hand.

Serena meets her for lunch on a Tuesday night, at a new restaurant she’s never been to before. A quartet plays quietly in the corner.

“You left,” Blair says. “Without saying goodbye. Again.”

Serena fiddles with her napkin ring. She has nothing to say to that.

“Well?” Blair says, a brittle voice with a demanding tone.

“Congratulations,” Serena finally manages to get out. “On your…engagement.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Serena looks into Blair’s face and her eyes sting. She’s not sure how this came to be, how sisters evolved into strangers. “Of course I do,” she says very softly.

Blair looks beautiful, hair softly curled, engagement ring glittering, but there is a sadness in her eyes to match that in Serena’s. “You missed it. You missed everything.”

“B,” Serena says, “I’m sorry.”

“You can’t _stay_ ,” Blair says. “You’ve never been able to and I _hate_ it about you.” Her breath escapes from her lips in a little gasp and the tension in her shoulders eases. “I don’t _understand_ it about you.”

Serena sets the napkin ring down and folds her hands in her lap. “I know,” she says softly. “I know.”

 

 

 

After a month, Serena realizes that she might be living in New York again, and she tries to make her peace with that. She goes shopping at Barneys for herself and for Carter, trying to equip him with Manhattan-appropriate shoes. She buys croissants from her favourite bakery early in the morning and leaves them for Carter on the bedside table. She goes for walks in the park and reads Page Six in the grass, relieved to only see her face once, shortly after her return.

Five weeks in, she gets an extraordinarily fluffy cat and buys it a bunch of toys that it never plays with. Carter names it Iago and, to Serena’s surprise, lets the cat sleep on his pillow and dive at his feet whenever they move under the sheets.

 

 

 

It is in New York that she realizes that she is screwed, that she is in love, and it’s not the dramatic, heartbreaking stuff of her youth but a simple fact. She makes sure Carter’s suits get to the dry cleaners’ and she puts on conservative dresses and pretty smiles for the dinner parties he attends and she’s here, in this city, the place she never wanted to go back to.

There is a part of her that is unhappy, but also a part of her that is beyond happy when Carter leans down and kisses his forehead as he slips off to work in the very early morning.

As always, Serena is unsure of what she wants.

 

 

 

In their unlit bedroom, after a cocktail party, Serena strips off her dress and opens the window, letting the crisp wind blow in accompanied by an occasional snowflake. Iago peers outside suspiciously and Serena tells Carter everything. _Everything_ – about her father and Lola, about the hell that was DanandBlair, about just how impossible it is for her to work out some sort of functional relationship with her mother. She tells him she doesn’t belong here, that she tried like hell to find home in her birthplace but she never could, that all the slips and the lacy dresses with ladylike hemlines aren’t her, just like she’s sure the damn company and all it’s obligations aren’t him, but what the hell does she know anyway – she knows what she’s not, but not what she is.

“I don’t know who I am,” she tells him, and her words don’t sound as sad as she expected them to, they just sound like a fact, like a truth.

He puts his hand on her neck and kisses her hard. “Honey,” he says, the word that will always make her melt just a little, “I do.”

 

 

 

Serena leaves Manhattan with Carter’s hand in the back pocket of her jeans and a cat as her carry-on. The door of the plane shuts and she whispers to Iago as he mews in protest of his confinement and Carter’s hand is in his hair, twirling strands idly, and something in her knows he’s going to try to talk her into the tiny bathroom with him in an hour or two and it makes her smile to herself, a private smile behind the curtain of her hair, and the strange space beneath her heart feels smaller.


End file.
